Top 10 Thoughts Upon Finishing the Harry Potter series

SPOILERS!!!! THIS GODDAMN POST CONTAINS GODDAMN HARRY POTTER SPOILERS!!! BIG TIME!!! YOU'VE BEEN GODDAMNED WARNED!!!!!!

10. Luna Lovegood is a more poignant character than most people realize - perhaps even more than J.K. Rowling realized. She's depicted as crazy for believing in ridiculous things...by people who believe in ridiculous things. "That Luna, she's so nutty! She thinks gnome saliva is good for you! What a weirdo! I'll talk to you more about Luna after my trip. I'm going to fly through the sky on a stick made for sweeping up garbage." It's kind of like people who make fun of Tom Cruise and all those crazy scientologists, and then spend their Sundays praying that the invisible man in the sky will make all their problems go away.

Also, her name makes her sound like an illiterate, eccentric hooker.

9. I would hate to be one of J.K. Rowling's kids. They probably have good, expensive, private educations, but they're probably all named "Flappityblattle" and "Blortimer".

8. Rowling didn't kill even one. FUCKING!!!! MALFOY? Not even ONE?!?! Come on! Didn't she see Lucius Malfoy in The Patriot? Son of a bitch.

7. I would make a good half-a-detective. I kept getting a good chunk of the mystery solved, but never the whole thing. In Prisoner of Azkaban for example, I figured out Sirius was transforming into an animal but - either completely ignoring his name, thinking it was meant to distract, or just (let's be honest) not even knowing what the hell it meant until after the fact - I figured he was Hermione's new (at the time) cat Crookshanks. I figured the big dog was Lupin because Rowling basically put a big fucking billboard on the character that screamed HE'S A WEREWOLF from the get-go, and I wasn't figuring there were two separate characters transforming into canine type deals. Likewise, I was pretty much 99% sure that Snape killed Dumbledore on Dumbledore's orders (Dumbledore's pleading of "Severus...please" wouldn't make sense otherwise because he was supposed to have thought Snape was coming to help him), and I was also fairly sure that Dumbledore was already dying from something else. However, I completely forgot about his fucked up hand and thought he was dying from the potion he drank to get the fake horcrux out of the sea cave.

So I wouldn't necessarily hire me as a private detective. But as a stripper? Hell, YES.

6. Speaking of the Snape-kills-Dumbledore ruse, that brings up something else. Harry reveals that Snape was one of the good guys - something he only believes because Snape granted him his memories as he died. If, on the other hand, Snape had survived the whole mess and been granted the Elder Wand as Dumbledore supposedly planned, how the hell would he have convinced anyone that he wasn't really one of Voldemort's guys? How the hell would anyone even let him survive long enough to prove it (provided there even was a way for him to prove it)? My guess is, super-wand or no super-wand, he would be hunted for the rest of his days and there wouldn't be very many of them.

Conclusion? Dumbledore was kind of an asshole.

5. Snape's story was the reveal I was looking forward to the most, and it didn't disappoint. I find him more interesting than just about any other character in the series.

4. The final battle is really, really wonderful. But you know, I know what I'm about to say is easy, predictable, and completely beside the point. But I don't care.

With all the talk of Mudbloods and Muggle-this and Muggle-that and how silly and helpless the Muggles are, did anyone else think if just one of those little Weasley brats had an uzi, that battle would've been about 50 pages shorter?

3. Neville vs. Nagini = Total F#@$% YEAH moment.

2. Poor Hedwig.

1. I enjoyed the Harry Potter series a lot and am glad my lovely girlfriend finally convinced me to check it out. I can't say that, for my tastes, it surpasses Lord of the Rings, but I do have to say there's one place where Rowling got it right and Tolkien got it wrong.

Elves as ugly little Gollum-esque slaves? I can live with that.

I've always been a dwarf man myself. IRONFORGE RULES! SANTA'S HELPERS GO GET STUFFED!